Signs and limits

mood: tired

There are posted signs and speed limits, and there are the rules of the road people actually live and drive by, and they usually relate to one another only very loosely. The sign says '30 mph' and the thing actually done there is 45 mph; the person who obeys the sign rather than the traffic becomes the stone in the stream, and an annoyance to his neighbors. Sign says 'no turn on red'; usage says 'fuck it'.

When there is a "crackdown" and the rules as written are suddenly enforced, people have every right to rebel. The victims of enforcement are losers at one of life's lotteries and don't really deserve it either. They did nothing everybody else wasn't doing.

The difference between these traffic enforcement situations and the current round of stale persecutions is that many of them are about things that there weren't any written rules for, even. Yes, the facts will always very. But at the very least, Louis CK apparently did all that the law required of him. Now suddenly a copped feel thirty years ago is supposed to be a Big Deal. If it wasn't then, the passage of thirty years should not turn it into a present outrage.

The new sexual McCarthyism is like traffic cameras that see into the past and issue citations for the way you drove thirty years ago. If you get one from back then in the present you get fired, you become the object of a social media shitstorm, the target of a congressional investigation, and your movie isn't released. Because a faceless mob has decided out of the blue that punishing people who drove recklessly thirty years ago is now a major priority.